The $80 Million Machine Digging Seattle's Underground Highway Hasn't Moved In Months

An ambitious project to build a highway under downtown Seattle
has been stalled since early December, and it will be quite a
while before work resumes.

The idea of the $3.1 billion project is to demolish the Alaskan Way
Viaduct, a waterfront highway that was damaged in a 2001
earthquake.

Drivers will go the two miles underground instead.

But the $80 million tunneling machine charged with making that
happen has broken down 60 feet below the surface, and repairs are
going to take months.

Now some are wondering if it's time to give up on the centerpiece
of the $3.1 billion Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement program.

Known as Bertha, the world's largest tunneling machine weighs
7,000 tons and measures 57.5 feet in diameter. It began work in
July 2013 and broke down in early December, after digging just
1,023 feet out of the planned 9,270.

The problem, according to the state's Department of
Transportation, is a damaged seal, which protects the bearing
that allows the cutterhead to spin.

With Bertha 60 feet down, making repairs is complicated.

According to Crosscut, a Seattle-based news
outlet, the only way to fix the seal is to dig a shaft to reach
the front of the machine, or access it through the back of the
rig. Either way, the work will take months, and workers still
don't know what caused the problem in the first place, the WSDOT
says.

In a post on Seattle Transit Blog, Ben
Schiendelman argued there are better ways to use the $800 million
the state has left in its project budget, like fixing the street
grid to make the highway less crucial, and improving public
transit:

It’s important, though, to consider the massive opportunity cost
of spending this much money on such a high risk single project.
The tunnel was justified over and over by proponents by asserting
that surface/transit/I-5 couldn’t cover the required trips. Even
at this late date, there is still enough money to address those
problems, and dramatically improve the city’s environmental
footprint and many other measures we care about.

Crosscut reports that when asked if it's time
to pull the plug on Bertha, Washington Governor Jay Inslee said,
"I don't think we're at that point."